Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Literatures & Languages

Advisor

Lía Schwartz

Committee Members

Marithelma Costa

José del Valle

Subject Categories

Arts and Humanities | Comparative Literature | Creative Writing | Fiction | Modern Languages | Poetry | Spanish Literature

Keywords

novela corta, siglo de Oro, creación literaria, imitación, originalidad, Barroco, Cervantes, Góngora, lectores, Camerino, Boccaccio, Bandello, Lope de Vega

Abstract

When Cervantes publishes his collection of Novelas Ejemplares in 1613, he introduces a type of composition that lacked academic prestige and was not in any way regulated. Although Italian and Spanish writers had already dabbled with brief narrative fictions, it is the author of El Quijote who pushes the new genre in which he skillfully articulates the literary traditions. The success of his collection is immediate; numerous editions of his novellas in various Spanish cities are testimony of the bases which the author was setting, and he rapidly begins to be imitated. The readers enthusiastically receive and consume the short novella in which patterns and stereotypes are repeated.

Although literary critics have seen Cervantes as the sole creator of the short novella, new investigations have revealed that he wasn’t the only contributor to its development. In effect, the language and rhetorical devices put forward by Luis de Góngora leave their own significant imprint in the novellas that are written after the diffusion of his major poems. In this era, authors compose following a dual impulse where the literary traditions and Cervantes, as well as the new tendencies from the author of the Soledades play an important role.

It is in this intricate and complex first quarter of the 17th century that José Camerino appears in the context of Spanish literature. An author originally from Italy, once he moves to Madrid he begins to be part of “Academias” and starts gaining recognition. This investigation studies the author’s peculiar capacity for composing a collection of novellas that, only eleven years after Cervantes’, articulate classical motifs in combination with the new practices of Baroque writing. Composed in 1624, his Novelas Amorosas are proof of the constant dialogue that the author engaged in with the novellieri and Cervantes, incorporating literature’s koinoi topoi in combination with a ‘gongorized’ prose that corresponded to what was known as literary creation

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